With Internet use forming an ever greater part of day to day life, malicious software—often called “malware”—that steals or destroys system resources, data, and private information is an increasing problem. Governments and businesses devote significant resources to preventing intrusions by malware. Malware comes in many forms, such as computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, keystroke loggers, adware, and rootkits. Some of the threats posed by malware are of such significance that they are described as cyber terrorism or industrial espionage.
Often, organizations and individuals experience these threats without any knowledge of others experiencing the same threats. An attack on one company is dealt with by that company alone, and others do not learn from that company's experience or leverage its solution.
Occasionally, those suffering an attack will publicly share their experience and solution or will share such information with a select few, such as customers or subsidiaries. This sharing of information occurs manually, however, under the direction or security or information technology personnel of the affected party. Such personnel may retrieve and share log files, file names, hashes, new policies, etc. through electronic mail, file transfer, or other technology. Personnel at a receiving entity must then manually apply any received solutions or craft solutions based on received information.
In this cyber ecosystem of security islands, then, adversaries are free to attack each entity without any concern about true concerted efforts among affected entities.